My Body Will Rest In Hope - Good Friday
So this is what happened to the best of us. All the hopes
and expectations have been cut down. They cried
‘Hosanna’ last week; now they just cry. The one
who healed the sick didn’t heal Himself. The one who
gave sight to the blind couldn’t see where this was
going to end. The One who raised Lazarus from death is now
dead. No one was standing next to Mary telling her to
‘celebrate His life’ or to ‘try and keep
His memory alive’. No one was consoling her by saying
that Jesus was now ‘in a better place’ or that
He would ‘always live in her heart.’ No, this
whole thing ended up as one big mess.
The place was a garbage dump so no one had to clean it up
anyway. The rain washed most of the
‘unpleasantness’ away. Most of the crowd grew
tired of this ugly scene and a few of the Roman guard were
there to make sure no one did anything “funny”
with the dead preacher’s body. The sun was beginning
to set and this long day was coming to the end.
We don’t like to leave it there, do we? We appreciate
the Gospel account that the body was wrapped in clean white
linen and laid in a spanking-new clean tomb. The two
criminals who were executed with Jesus were probably not as
fortunate as the Roman practice was to dump their remains
and leave them for the scavengers. But we still cannot
avoid the scene on Calvary. Michelangelo carved his Pieta
to show it. Caravaggio’s dramatic deposition of
Christ tries to dramatize it with dark hues and contrast.
But no one here can really do more than try and imagine it.
We stand wordless before the silent scene of Mary holding
the dead Body of her Son.
And this cold, colorless image is why we are here. It is
the body, no longer living, that is our salvation. Like the
hecklers, we don’t like to see it. We prefer the
serene Christ on a crucifix or a “resurrection
cross” of a Savior popping out with nary a scratch.
The death of Jesus Christ is the death of His body. It is
all He offered because it is total. On the cross, He is the
sacrifice and the priest who offers it. Unable to
physically move, He changes the course of eternity. What we
see and celebrate today in symbol and image was not
anything like that on Golgotha. The song of salvation was
heard in the silence of His dead-quiet body.
Some religion, eh? This is a day of silence and emptiness.
We commemorate the greatest defeat in human history. The
Savior could not, or rather, did not save Himself. We stand
in a reverent silence and are left with the stone-cold
reality that the mission of Christ is over and has ended
with such disaster.
But even as we hear words like that, something stirs from
within us. No, Father, you’re wrong. Your preaching a
message that is not true. You ask us to hold in our
mind’s eye what Mary held in her arms. Fine, but we
cannot leave it at that. If that’s all there is, then
why are we here? Why do we waste our time with Calvary if
that really is the end of the story? Your reaction is
correct; your instincts are stirred by grace. And you have
entered the misty wilderness of hope.
My body will lie in hope is a prayer from the Psalms that
we pray on a day like this. There is something very deep
within us that says the story does not end this way. Not
for Jesus, not for us. The deeper the horror, the deeper
the hope. No wonder all those images of Mary weeping while
cradling her deceased Child almost make us yell to her that
tears are understandable but hardly final. We see a
dramatic crucifix and say “yes, but…”
Hope Is found not in the happy illusions of human
superiority but in the lifeless body of the deathless One
who chose to die for us. Our truest hope for ourselves
while we exist in these bodies will be found in the body of
Christ, offered and accepted on the Cross. When we tell
Mary that her tears are short termed, we also tell
ourselves that ours will have no long duration as well. We
enter the pain of this moment because of the dark hours we
all know. And by grace alone, we thereby enter the endless
gory of the One whose death has brought hope in spite of
despair.
And so we pray to our living God who has died in our
humanity. We venerate the cross, the tool with which our
heavenly homes were built. We receive the Sacrament of His
body as we hold it as Mary once did on Calvary. And because
we do, we hope. Today is Good Friday. That’s not
ironic or sarcastic; that’s just accurate. In the
scary reality of life and death, we find the greatest good.
In His Body we are free to live forever in our own. In His
shameful death we are freed from the shame of sin.
Today is a good day, a bright day. In the ugly tragedy of
the Cross we find what the world refuses to look at. Like
the sick or the troublesome, we want to put it way and hide
it. We don’t want it near us to remind us.
But we know better. We know hope. And because we do, we
adore Thee O Christ and we praise Thee; because by Thy holy
Cross Thou hast redeemed the world.